One second-generation Chinese-American and two second-generation Vietnamese-Americans. And a tiny person.

When we land at the airport, Boyfriend’s brother can’t stop talking about how nice the new airport looks.

“You thought you were in the Saw bathroom?” he asks, referring to the one bathroom I refused to use in Hong Kong the week prior. “Well the old airport used to be the Saw airport.”

In all aspects, the current Ho Chi Minh City Airport looks like an average airport to me. The white tiled floor gleams against the sterile fluorescent lighting. The ceiling is high; the space is open and clean. But I suppose that is the point.

Being that this is my first time in Vietnam, I take his word for it.

The luggage conveyor belt starts with a sudden lurch and we answer it with a little dance. Boyfriend shakes his head silently.

The Saigon Notre-Dame Basilica

One of the very first things we do after landing is get massages. It’s about $7 USD for a 90 minute deep tissue and hot stone massage during which you get a cucumber mask application and an herbal foot bath.

Yeah. I know.

Afterward, you’re presented with a small cup of ginger tea and bowl of ginger candy that you may drink and nibble on before tipping the masseuse.

Saigon, you are rockin’ the First Impression.

Standard fare at the night market: clams, snails, balut.

That same night we scout out the biggest night market in the city. We see things we like. I ask Boyfriend to haggle for me, but the vendors cut us no deals. It’ll be a full week before we learn that the vendors in Saigon barely haggle at all. Too many foreign tourists paying set prices make haggling an archaic (and pretty much extinct) practice in the city.

The next few days are spent mostly visiting Boyfriend’s family. Everyone is happy to see each other and trying to make up for lost time.

It’s a familiar story, one that I’m intimately acquainted with as almost my entire extended family also lives overseas. It’s hard to come back often enough. Life easily gets in the way.

This point hits home hardest when I watch Boyfriend’s mom hold her father’s hand again, for the first time in what I’m assuming is years. I think about my own grandfathers, and how even though living in Taiwan for the couple of years after graduation probably debilitated my career options in various and significant ways, at least I got to spend time with them before they both passed.

And that ‘at least’ occupies more and more space in my head as the years go by.

It’s a one-way path you set along, thinking things and having ideas about why you make the decisions you do. But as much as you talk yourself into it, as much as you are convinced that whatever is the right choice, the better choice, your logic brain never can overcome your emotional brain. And it’s that brain that keeps telling the eyes to look back, hoping that your loved ones don’t vanish as soon as you do.

A street food vendor prepping the grill

“Isn’t Saigon great?” Boyfriend’s brother turns to look at me in the cab on the way home from a night out.

I smile, wondering if he feels the greatness is inherent to the city or a feeling derived from living in a life temporarily, among your own people, among the family you haven’t seen in years.

Because, you know what? That is that a great feeling.